(My) Best of 09: Director.

5. Marco Bellocchio for "Vincere" (read my review)

Italian director Marco Bellocchio has confessed he had never heard about Ida Dalser's (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) story before he embarked on writing and directing "Vincere". Watching the movie however, you get the sensation that he has always been an expert on the subject.
The way he takes Dalser's tragic story and transforms it into a metaphor for the fate of his country under fascism is an enterprise that recalls Pasolini's "Saló" and perfects what Eastwood failed to do so miserably in "Changeling".
The mastery of combining history with intimacy is rarely achieved to such levels of sublimity and the performances Bellocchio gets from his lead actors are electrifying.


4. Lars von Trier for "Antichrist" (read my review)

Whether you liked "Antichrist" or not, the one thing you can not say is that Lars von Trier doesn't know what he's doing.
From its operatic opening to its Bosch-ian interludes, the movie is defined by the overpowering visions of its creator. The mad Dane has always specialized in polarizing audiences and this might be his most controversial movie in that aspect.
Some are enthralled by his medieval horror techniques, others are disgusted by his alleged misogyny and in my case I was moved by his raw self examination.
If few people acknowledge the existence of a god through their art, less of them would hold a public quarrel with this being like von Trier.


3. Jane Campion for "Bright Star" (read my review)

Poetry is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be felt. I had read that before a million times and even tried to reason it using Edward de Bono's lateral thinking techniques.
I never truly got it until I saw "Bright Star". In the same way you burden your mind trying to crack the codes of a poem, Jane Campion probably wondered how to transport John Keats' (Ben Whishaw) life to the silver screen in a manner that would defy all biopic conventions.
She chose to do it as a visual poem. How "Bright Star" is able to tell and make us feel is owed to Campion's subtly magnificent work.
Every scene in the movie works like a verse. That they were extracted from the prose of her screenplay are only small proofs of her ability to transform the intellectual into the emotional.


2. Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker" (read my review)

Whether it's your third or second time watching "The Hurt Locker" your heart will still race and your pulse will still accelerate in the same scenes.
That is Kathryn Bigelow's extraordinary gift. She is able to encode visceral feelings into scenes we've seen a million times and as much as we deconstruct them we never know what is it exactly that she does to maintain eternal suspense.
And that's only in the action sequences! She also observes her characters and creates fascinating worlds for them which they bring into the larger universe of the movie.
Like a master juggler, Bigelow knows when to deliver exactly what we need and she's able to maintain an enigmatic mood that make the movie mean something different to whoever's watching it.


1. Michael Haneke for "The White Ribbon" (read my review)

When strange events start occurring in a small German village, the locals panic and then slowly overcome the unsolved tragedy, until a new one occurs. Then they repeat the process.
Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke once again explores the nature of violence as he's done in some of his best works like "Funny Games" and "Benny's Video".
In Palm d'Or winner "The White Ribbon" one would think he achieves some sort of epiphany but the truth is he still comes up with what might be just an hypothesis about the source of brutality in our world.
As darkly playful as ever, he is represented by a schoolteacher during one key scene in which he comes up with an unexpected suspect regarding the crimes.
"You have a sick imagination" replies another character disgusted by the repercussions the teacher's theories might have on the quiet village life.
Regardless of the not so subtle Freudian fact that Haneke is represented by a scholar, it can't be denied that few working directors muster the courage to make the kind of statements he does.
Not many artists are as fascinated by the human intellect and even less stimulate it as often as he does.

Edge of Darkness **1/2

Director: Martin Campbell
Cast: Mel Gibson
Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, Bojana Novakovic, Denis O'Hare
Damian Young, Jay O. Sanders, Shawn Roberts

If there's something Mel Gibson knows how to do, it's being a movie star. As Boston detective Thomas Craven-on the hunt for his daughter's (Novakovic) killers-there's not a single moment where you can, or want to, take your eyes off of him.
He inhabits each frame with such a magnetic pull that you instantly forget what the actor becomes when he drinks and talks.
This of course serves this kind of movie well, considering its plot (based on an 80's British miniseries) makes no real sense and has nothing profound to say.
Because it involves ecological activists confused as terrorists, sinister CEOs (a slimier than usual Huston in this case), nuclear threats and Republican senators, it might be taken for some sort of comment on the current state of the world.
Truth is that in this case you can almost ignore the factual context and imagine this is a noir throwback or a B movie with absolutely no serious intentions other than to take a simple concept and expand it for entertainment's sake.
"This isn't about police, this is about me knowing what I need to know" says Craven to a suspect, in the process describing what the movie is.
The whole plot is centered on whether he will make justice to his daughter or not, it doesn't take long into the film for any clever audience member to wonder why the hell doesn't anybody just kill Craven.
Later on the film teases us about this when one of the characters suggests justice should be made so "convoluted that everyone has a theory but no one has the facts".
Yes, the writers could've killed Craven at any moment and have dozens of ways in which to cover up his crime for the sake of the "bad guys" but to do so would be to rob us of the pleasure of watching Gibson, trenchcoat and all, in an old fashioned revenge movie.
Screenwriter William Monahan could've fashioned the plot into something like his terrific "The Departed" (the Boston setting and the last setpiece give off the influence) but in doing so Craven would've had to become human, instead of the melodramatic archetype he actually is.
When it comes down to basics "Edge of Darkness" is nothing but a tale of how a father would do anything for their child (the fantasy sequences with his daughter being completely redundant) and how to do so would be willing to become "the guy with nothing to lose and who doesn't give a shit".

A White Prophet.

It was a wonderful night for two of the year's best films which continued collecting the awards they began garnering in Cannes almost a year ago.

Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon" deservedly won the prestigious ASC award for motion picture cinematography beating fellow Oscar nominees "Avatar", Inglourious Basterds" and "The Hurt Locker".
This could bode well for Austrian DP Christian Berger come Oscar day if it weren't for the fact that the Academy rarely chooses the best in the bunch.
Oscar and ASC have matched four times in the past decade and usually the guild has chosen the worthiest nominee (the year Emmanuel Lubezki won for "Children of Men" being the clearest example).
They have also shown their love for black and white in the past giving their top award to Roger Deakins for "The Man Who Wasn't There".
Also, contrary to what "The Hollywood Reporter" is saying this isn't the first time that a foreign language film takes the top award. Just five years ago Bruno Delbonnel won for his exquisite sepia work in "A Very Long Engagement". It also wouldn't mean the ASC has suddenly gone foreign, only one out of the five last winners was American.

Across the Atlantic, Jacques Audiard's brilliant "A Prophet" won nine Cesar awards including Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Niels Arestrup) and in a surprising event both Best Actor and Breakthrough Actor for the amazing Tahar Rahim.
Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress and in one of those strange things only the French understand "Gran Torino" beat "Milk", "Slumdog Millionaire" and "The White Ribbon" to take home Best Foreign Language Film.


Both movies are the the top contenders to win the foreign film Oscar in a week and honestly both are absolutely deserving of all the praise they've gotten.

From Paris With Love *

Director: Pierre Morel
Cast: John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Kasia Smutniak, Richard Durden, Amber Rose Revah

If Luc Besson was the savior of the action movie, he also put a curse on it that prevents his imitators from achieving the kind of B movie thrills he could deliver so easily.
Pierre Morel is such a case and on this movie, based on a story by Besson, he relies to every lazy trick in the book to finish with something that's not quite entertaining to begin with.
The film centers on the partnership between James Reece (Meyers) and Charlie Wax (Travolta) American agents trying to solve a case in Paris, who couldn't be more different if they tried.
Reece works as the ambassador's (Durden) assistant and is the kind of guy who gets called "methodical", while Wax is something of a chaos, always looking for sex and fun he has no regards to how many people he kills in order to get the work done.
If you think the opposites-as-a-team concept isn't quite fresh, the film's plot and its major twist can be guessed by anyone with the most minimal knowledge of the action genre and bad line delivery.
The action sequences are the kind that make no sense, are no fun and even look bad. Because the film has so many lazy plot twists, we end with something that pushes the concept of degrees of separation into pure absurdity.
When the movie begins they're looking for cocaine dealing Asians and before we know it they're on the hunt for Islamic fundamentalists.
Its views on villains and justice are very telling of the predominantly biased American foreign policy post 9/11 but Morel doesn't give a damn about coherent political theories or even postmodernist deconstruction of the genre through these clichés.
He's so enamored by the way he comes up with bloodbaths and explosions that it takes us no time to figure out that if the characters keep on destroying the city, we won't always have Paris.

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief **

Director: Chris Columbus
Cast: Logan Lerman, Alexandra Daddario, Brandon T. Jackson
Sean Bean, Kevin McKidd, Steve Coogan, Melina Kanakaredes
Rosario Dawson, Pierce Brosnan, Catherine Keener, Uma Thurman
Joe Pantoliano, Dylan Neal, Jake Abel

With the end of the Harry Potter movies in a couple of years, the vacant spot for teenager magical hero is up for grabs.
One of the first entries we get is Percy Jackson (Lerman) the demigod, son of Poseidon (McKidd) and Sally Jackson (a misused Keener) who discovers his origin when a fury tries to kill him.
He also learns that his best friend Grover (Jackson) is a satyr working as his caretaker and his teacher Mr. Brunner (Brosnan) is a centaur who also works as trainer and counselor in a demigods training camp.
When his mother is kidnapped by a minotaur, Percy learns that the gods of Olympus are in a hassle over his alleged theft of Zeus' (Bean) thunder-don't ask-and war will erupt if he doesn't return it in time.
Of course the movie never cares to explain why Percy is accused of such a crime or how the gods could think he did it if he was ignorant of his ancestry. What the movie is interested in is setting in motion a plot to update Greek myths and have Percy become a Homeric hero who shields himself from Medusa's (a deliciously slimy Thurman) stare with his iPod and escapes the evil lotus-eaters from a Las Vegas casino where Lady GaGa is the musical artist of choice.
The fact that it's easy to see how the whole movie worries on ways to introduce possible situations for a sequel is not half as annoying as Columbus' aesthetic choices and direction.
You can practically hum Potter's musical theme from the notes Percy's composer Christophe Beck chooses for this movie.
The whole thing is more preoccupied with becoming the next Harry Potter than to carve out its own identity or take advantage of the richness within Greek mythology and its repercussions on our daily life (which happen to be more than anything crafted in Hogwarts...).
If to that you add the inane nature with which Columbus orchestrates the action sequences and the visual effects which seem to have been made circa 2001 and you will realize there's nothing much that sounds too appealing about this hero.
If it weren't for the rather impressive supporting cast (Bean and McKidd quarrel with such authority that you won't dare to laugh at their cheesy dialogues) which turns into a "who's next?" sort of guessing game, there would be little to enjoy in this film.
The younger leads seem to have been told to act as if they lacked any charm and were playing action figures while the somewhat dark humor (that must come from the novel it's based on) is killed by Columbus' need to chew, digest and throw up everything for us.
When we learn that Hades is located in Hollywood, our chuckles are killed by the awful Columbus who decides to set the road trip there to a certain AC/DC track.
At least he's faithful to the movie's mythical spirit, for every time the film is about to do something good, Columbus pulls off a Sisyphus, dragging us down with him.

(My) Best of 09: Supporting Actress.

5. Mélanie Laurent in "Inglourious Basterds" (read my review)

As Shosanna Dreyfus, French beauty Laurent becomes the vessel of revenge in Quentin Tarantino's historical fantasy.
She's your archetype QT female character: driven, intimidating and so damn cool. Laurent's perfect dramatic timing serves her greatly in scenes with Christoph Waltz and in her most iconic moment she is able to evoke Nastassja Kinski and "The Wizard of Oz", all at the same time.



4. Gwyneth Paltrow in "Two Lovers" (read my review)

As a woman completely unaware of her power over men, Gwyneth Paltrow gives "Two Lovers" its central theme: our ability or inability to escape from who we're becoming.
She plays Michelle, next door neighbor to Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), an indecisive young man who sees in her the opportunity to start over. She makes it clear that she's in love with someone else and Leonard willingly enters her world of self destruction.
She takes Michelle to femme fatale levels as she becomes an addiction to Leonard. We know she's no good and we know her hysterics and drama are the last thing we need, but we would never refuse an invitation to join her on the dancefloor.


3. Penélope Cruz in "Nine" (read my review)

For someone who first catches our attention by stating she's not wearing any clothes, it's a miracle that Penélope Cruz gives Carla her best moments dressed head to toe and looking as if hell walked over her.
As the mistress of famed director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) she sizzles in the hilarious, if a bit underwhelming "A Call from the Vatican", but Cruz knows better than to give it all to us at once and the number, contrary to our beliefs, is nothing but foreplay.
She's brilliant in latter scenes where she quietly lets Guido put makeup on her, fully aware that she is after all another character he needs to direct in his life and she breaks your heart upon the realization that she will never ascend to a lead role.
She might be wearing gorgeous clothes but it's in these introspective, dark moments where Cruz seems completely naked.


2. Rosamund Pike in "An Education" (read my review)

Helen (Pike) is the kind of woman who would've been played by Marilyn Monroe or Gloria Grahame in the 1950's. Characters around her would've described her as someone "who's dumb and knows it" and as trophy girlfriend to a distinguished bachelor (Dominic Cooper in this case) she would've been used mainly for comedic relief and eye candy.
But what Rosamund Pike does with Helen goes beyond beauty and perfect, almost musical, comedic timing (few actors delivered their lines better in any 2009 film) she finds the truth inside her that characters around her are so desperate to find.
The film's lead (Carey Mulligan) is trying to find a reason; Helen may not have found hers' but she's so self aware of her limitations that she is not willing to compromise inner peace for mere survival.


1. Marion Cotillard in "Nine" (read my review)

Contrary to what she thinks, Luisa Contini (Cotillard) might just be the most special character in "Nine". As wife of Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) she does more than stand his infidelities, deal with his paranoia and give good social face.
She also happens to be his muse and moral center. Of course this isn't enough to keep a person alive, especially when there is nothing in it for you.
Just as Guido must learn to appreciate her more, Luisa needs to learn the difference between obligation and love. She's as guilty as Guido in how they both have turned their marriage into an addiction, yet we can't accuse her of weakness. Cotillard turns Luisa into someone who has made a lifestyle out of submission.
But the actress is so subtle that she gives Luisa a wordless backstory that make us become fascinated by the enigma she represents.
When she sings the heartbreaking "My Husband Makes Movies" she establishes who she is at the moment and when we get to the harrowing, almost brutal "Take it All" she finally takes her own stand.
Cotillard of course doesn't make this an obvious transition from backbone-less being to proud amazon; but a smooth, beautiful realization that to love someone else we must love ourselves first.

Legion **

Director: Scott Stewart
Cast: Paul Bettany, Dennis Quaid, Kate Walsh
Kevin Durand, Charles S. Dutton, Tyrese Gibson, Lucas Black
Adrianne Palicki, Willa Holland, Jon Tenney

It's angels in dirty places in Scott Stewart's "Legion"; a post apocalyptic thriller that uses biblical references to back up its emptiness while giving us the sight of badass angels fighting each other with machine guns.
Bettany plays the Archangel Michael who lands in an L.A. gun warehouse one night, stocks up on ammo and leads a rebellion against god, who asked him to destroy the human race.
He chooses a lonely diner in the middle of the Mojave desert as his headquarters. That the diner is filled with the kinds of people that constitute disaster movie ethnic and gender quota is just a nice coincidence.
Among the people are the owner (Quaid) and his son (Black), the faithful cook (Dutton) and a pregnant single waitress (Palicki) whose unborn child might represent the faith of humanity (nobody said the movie was subtle).
Soon they start receiving all sorts of plagues which range from knife bearing six year olds, to good ole fashioned teenage daughter (Holland) vs. mom (Walsh) drama.
You don't have to be a scholar to know this isn't the kind of movie to revisit and uncover new layers in subsequent viewings, it's main aim is probably to entertain us and itself, to a degree, with its oh so serious attempt at delivering faith-cum-fun.
The actors are great in how they manage to keep straight faces when the screenplay often verges into the ridiculous. When the characters are made to deliver lines like "not everybody can play a hero" you just know you're in the land of Ah-nuld and to find any trace of method genius or Shakespearean classicism here would be most likely a miracle.
Anyone who chooses to ponder too deeply into the contrived spiritual matters at the center of "Legion" (as many extreme Christian groups will obviously do) wouldn't need to be so enlightened to figure out that the movie is all about praising god.
For how else could Michael be the hero if it doesn't mean that even this rebellion is part of god's design?
Those less theologically inclined will be thankful that this supreme being didn't just choose to snap his fingers and destroy mankind, but he created a zombie massacre out of it for them to enjoy their pop corn.
What you need to ask yourself while watching "Legion" is: will you give that leap of faith and surrender to its cheesiness?
If not there's probably thousands of movies which will be more heavenly than this.